A high-linearity optical receiver with background-light-AGC for high PAPR signals is presented. The integrated BiCMOS optical receiver consists of a TIA with AGC, a linear amplifier and a line driver. The receiver THD is 1.7% and the third-order intermodulation is 50 dBc at 20 MHz and at an input optical power of −3.5 dBm. The third-order intermodulation decreases to 40 dBc at 100 MHz.